Blog

I like to say that "motivation is a solved problem"

When a child says “reading is too hard”, often I find that simply validating their feelings is enough to get them moving.

Some people think Mentava’s results are a miracle. I do not.

In the 1960's a woman in New Zealand named Marie Clay thought that good readers read by guessing at whole words from context (the words around them, the letter they start with, or any pictures).

We get this question a lot:

Sometimes people try to tell me that “phonics doesn’t work”.

I got this question from a parent of a Mentava reader today:

Of the hundreds of families I’ve worked with in Mentava’s rigorous reading program, only several dozen kids have graduated.

Most apps that claim to be educational use glittering generalities to describe their results. They refer to ambiguous “phonics skills”, a “pathway that leads to literacy” or “boosting pre-literacy skills”.

Have you ever watched your child practice a skill — tying their shoes, riding a bike, or setting the dinner table — and realized they were unknowingly locking in a mistake?

I was asked a great question yesterday, which was: "How do we teach kids to read irregular words like comb/bomb/tomb?"

Sometimes people ask “What makes Mentava different? How are you teaching 3-year-olds to read so quickly?”

After introducing hundreds of kids to reading, some as young as 2, here’s what we’ve learned about developmental milestones at very young ages. Anecdotally, we see large variance even within individual families, so my guess is that these likely reflect minimum ages and there’s a much longer tail in the general population.

Today we’re announcing our new Mentava Basics curriculum, aimed at kids who are still a bit too young for the standard Mentava curriculum.

If you’ve tried to teach a child to read, you know that the hardest part is getting them to blend letter sounds together without pausing in between them.

Beginning readers frequently have trouble when single sounds are written with multiple letters, like "sh", "th", or "ay”.

They’re based on an outdated understanding of English and have barely changed in the last 500 years. So we wrote one that does it right, and we’ve made it available for free.

As I write this, there are more kids using Mentava for free than paying for it.

I've tried all the top reading apps, including ABC Mouse, Duolingo ABC, HOMER, Hooked on Phonics, Khan Academy Kids, and Reading Raven.

As a company creating software to teach 3 year olds to read, one of the most common questions we get is “but isn’t screen time bad for kids?” Parents and teachers are often surprised to hear that I agree.

When I set out to raise the seed round for Mentava (an edtech startup to accelerate childhood learning) earlier this year, I knew it would be a challenge. I was a solo, non-technical, first-time founder, pre-product, pre-team, without an impressive resume or connections to the investors I wanted.

Today, I’m excited to announce Mentava’s $3m seed funding to accelerate education. We've already begun teaching 2-year-olds to read.

Hello everyone! As of September 8, 2021, Mentava is now officially a real company. Happy birthday!